HAMR Hard Disk Drives Postponed To 2018 (anandtech.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Unfortunately the hard disk drive industry is not ready to go live with Heat-assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR). The technology is yet not reliable enough for mass production. Over the years, producers of hard drives, platters and recording heads have revealed various possible timeframes for commercial availability of drives with HAMR technology. Their predictions were not accurate. The current goalpost is set to year 2018. While solid state disks based on Flash memory keep seeing rapid improvements as well, HDDs still kick butt in scenarios where high areal density is more important than ripping transfer speeds. The areal density of HAMR products is predicted to exceed 1.5 Tb per square inch.

Comments

Will it be worth it in 2018?

[Mal-2]

The whole thing hard drives are counting on right now is cramming more data into a device, and at a lower cost, than SSDs. SSDs have yet to stop their progress up the Moore's Law ladder, and hard drives have never been on it. At some point in the not too distant future, cost might be the hard drive's only advantage. Not long after that, all they will have to count on is "SSDs fade if you put them on the shelf too long". The market for archival hard drives is fairly limited. HAMR was supposed to postpone the inevitable just a bit longer, but if they can't get it out the door on time, it may not be worth bothering at all. Those who need massive archives aren't all that concerned about them taking up space, by and large. The current technology is good enough for that.